William Bao Bean

Managing General Partner at Orbit Startups

Discussion leader

William is Managing General Partner of Orbit the Emerging Markets VC the longest running emerging market startup program in the world with over US$240m in investment value managed. Orbit invests in technology startups digitizing traditional industries and helping people make more money offering a better quality of life, all in a more sustainable way. Sectors include ecommerce, fintech, travel, media, health, education, and logistics across emerging markets in Asia, Middle East, Africa and LATAM. Orbit provides hands-on support for user acquisition, sales, partnerships, and fundraising. Orbit's consumer ecosystem has helped our startups scale to 238m monthly active users as of 4Q24. Magnitt named Orbit #6 most active VC in Emerging Venture Markets in both 2023 and 2024. William joined Orbit from SingTel Innov8 Ventures where he was a founding Managing Director. Prior to that William was a Partner at Softbank China & India, a VC backed by Softbank and Cisco, leading investments across Asia. William started his career in equity research most recently with Deutsche Bank where he was a top ranked analyst for Internet and Software in Asia and worked on the IPOs for Alibaba, Kingsoft, eLong (Expedia), OnMobile and Infoedge Naukri.

William was ranked #3 stock picker in Hong Kong/China and #1 for Technology, Media and Telecom by Thomson Reuters Starmine as well as #3 equity research analyst in Asia for Software and IT Services by Institutional Investor Magazine. William has done over 350 early stage investments including Bitmex in blockchain, UShopal in ecommerce, italki in edtech, Videoverse in AI, Carota in mobility, Flickstree in media, ELSA Speak in edtech, Tappytoon in media, Coutloot in ecommerce, and Dastgyr in fintech. He currently is on the boards of Scantrust, Boost Capital, Pandabus, Fleksy, Goama, and italki as well as Blair Academy. He holds a BA from Bowdoin College.